I’ve learned a lot about the challenges people face over the years across varying organizations when it comes to agile development and Scrum. But I’m always looking to help people solve their toughest or most nagging problems – and sometimes it’s easier to find out what those are just by asking.

So today, I’m asking you to take a moment to fill in a one-question survey for me. It’ll help me ensure I'm discussing the topics you are most interested in. The feedback you provide in this survey will be added to our list of topics to address in our blog and newsletter .

Would you like to include comments?

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About the Author

As the founder of Mountain Goat Software, Mike Cohn specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques to build extremely high-performance teams. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. He is also the founder of FrontRowAgile.com, an online agile training website. He can be reached at [email protected] or connect with Mike on Google+.

You may want to look at my online Agile Estimating and Planning class. It goes into how to create a fixed-price plan (bid) on a project. It is at https://www.frontrowagile.com/...

Posted by mikewcohn on 2014-05-11 13:10:08

To set some things straight. I have got experience with scrum and I know how the planning process goes in a Scrum project.

The question I have relates to the start of a project. Let's say I as a PM or Scrum master get a document from a client where it says roughtly what he wants.

An online platform

Some information what the website is about (lacking many details)

Various couplings (of which the description is ambigous)

And some deadlines.

Now the client wants a price quote. Now the question is how to go about this.

The customer wants his product on Time

We both don't want to have disagreements about the delivered work.

Was it promised or not. The customer wants a price quote while the specs are not clear yet

I would like to know how others deal with this problem.

Posted by dubbeltje on 2014-05-11 12:30:43

Hi Mike--I'd actually look at those challenges and think of them as reasons to use Scrum rather than reasons not to. When you have issues such as those, it's going to be extremely important to have more inter-team communication, clear shorter term goals, and frequent milestones as proof that working is coming together. I'd definitely use Scrum to coordinate the work of those teams.

Posted by mikewcohn on 2013-09-19 00:23:36

Hi Mike,

Our company uses Agile/Scrum for two product development teams quite well. However, at the same time we are also planning and executing several major projects to migrate applications and their interfaces between datacenters. We would like to reap some of the benefits of an Agile/Scrum approach to this problem but the myriad of cross team dependencies, shared resources and well defined end goals appear to be barriers. Would you agree?

Thanks,Mike

Posted by mike capille on 2013-09-18 22:03:13

Hi Ketan--I've written about using Balanced Scorecards for exactly this. Please see the next to last chapter of the Succeeding with Agile book for a discussion and examples.

Posted by mikewcohn on 2013-07-09 17:52:12

Hi Mike,

Have you heard of Agile/Lean organizations using Agile/Lean scorecard similar to Balanced Scorecard for business? I'm trying to gauge how successful Agile transformation is especially for an organization that is going through waterfall-to-agile transformation. It would be good to see some best practices or examples.